It's probably not the sort of thing that should be formalized, yet I feel that HN could be bringing people together more than it currently does. I wonder what new things could be tried.
Completely agree on this. Sometimes I even thought that the lack of the typical features that help creating "relationships" here was by design, to make it more difficult build coalitions/voting rings/subgroups.
What about simply adding private messaging? With an opt-out option for the receiver and a (low) minimum karma threshold for the sender, just to make it more difficult to create spam bots.
The amount of effort required to reach anyone who provides information in their profile feels about right. Contacting someone should be deliberate not reactive. If Googling or cutting and pasting a link is too much work, It can't be that important.
A HN convention would be very interesting though.